On Thursday, the Philadelphia Phillies released outfielder Nick Castellanos after months of threatening to do so. All offseason, I have read reports that the Phillies wanted to get rid of Castellanos, either by trading him or cutting him, if they had to. The underlying tone of these reports was that the Phillies would rather eat the rest of his contract ($20 million) than have to work with him again. This is not only terrible negotiating, because you indicate to other teams that you will most likely release him and pay his contract, and then they can sign him for cheaper instead of trading you for him. It's also petty.
The pettiness reached its peak yesterday, when the Phillies finally announced that they were releasing Castellanos, and at the same time he posted on Instagram two separate handwritten letters: one titled "Philadelphia" and one titled "Miami Incident."
The first is a thank-you letter to the city of Philadelphia. It's cute. He thanks everyone for embracing his son and wishes everyone good health. The second letter is the drama. Castellanos's hand was forced to write it because The Athletic's Matt Gelb reached out for comment about it. The story was going to break anyway, and it did in two versions: Gelb's reported version in The Athletic, and Castellanos's hand-written version on Instagram.
Everyone agrees that all of this drama is about a single game that happened on June 8 of last year. The Phillies were playing in Miami, Castellanos's home town, and in the eighth inning, Phillies manager Rob Thomson removed Castellanos from the game for defensive purposes. Pissed because he had been removed from a close ballgame when the stands were full of his friends and family, Castellanos went to the locker room, obtained a Presidente beer, and carried it back to the dugout during the game. This is not allowed. He also says in his letter that he told "Rob" that "too much slack in some areas and to tight of restrictions in others are not condusive [sic] to us winning."
Castellanos wrote that his teammates helped him cool down, and he apologized after the game. As a punishment, Castellanos was benched for the next game. We, the public, knew all about this as it happened. We knew there was a fight in the dugout. We knew that Castellanos was benched. The only thing we didn't know, that is now coming to light as the Phillies release him, is the beer.
"In the clubhouse, as prominent players distanced themselves from Castellanos, everyone agreed to play nice. It was easier for some than others. Many had a difficult time overcoming what they believed was an unforgivable act committed by Castellanos," Gelb wrote.
The Athletic article, using entirely anonymous sources from within the Phillies organization, also lists a couple of other petty grievances: He played music on a speaker in the locker room if he had a good game, even if the team lost; his son took batting practice before Game 2 of last year's NLDS while catcher J.T. Realmuto waited; and "he bristled when he thought other teammates were afforded more luxuries." I will grant that these things seem annoying. Everyone gets annoyed with their coworkers sometimes, and I imagine if you have to play 162 games under intense media and fan scrutiny, and you have to travel together all the time, those little annoyances can become unbearable. I imagine Castellanos has some negative opinions of his ex-teammates, too.
I find the way that the Phillies are handling this breakup immature and ridiculous. If everyone hated Castellanos's annoying speaker that he uses when he has a good game even if the team loses, the manager could have stopped that. If everyone hated that his son was there all the time, the manager could have also stopped that. Additionally, while the beer incident was a violation of MLB rules and a case of insubordination, Gelb reported that Phillies management decided to keep the incident quiet. Now that the relationship is over, they've changed their minds.
I have always liked Nick Castellanos as a player. I think that he's funny. I like that when once asked who his favorite superhero was, he picked Scooby-Doo. I like that the value he projects the most in public is being a good father. I like that when asked about the Roman Empire a few years ago when that was going viral, Castellanos said, "It took 2,000 years, right? For it to fall or whatever? The United States might fall much faster than that." I have a soft spot for him because he played on my team and many times, when I lost all hope, he hit a giant bomb to left field or a weird single up the middle, and my hope was reborn. And when I wrote a ridiculous blog about false-front jerseys, and how I thought Nick might have been the beginning of that trend for Phillies players, Nick's wife Jess slid into my DMs to tell me that it wasn't Nick who had started it. It was his previous colleague, Jason Heyward.
It does not bother me that no one loves to swing at a ball tailing down and away outside the strike zone more than Nick Castellanos. An 85-mph pitch on the outside bottom corner is irresistible to him. He loves it! It doesn't bother me because I see a lot of other things he does, too. I see him encourage a young outfielder to unbutton his jersey a little more. On Instagram, I see that other players are always at his house. Thursday, in the wake of all this drama, Otto Kemp's wife posted on Instagram that they lived with the Castellanoses when he first got called up. After 24-year-old Orion Kerkering threw away the Phillies' playoff hopes last season by making a game-ending error, as all the other players trotted sadly toward the dugout, Nick Castellanos beelined from right field to meet him on the mound.
The Athletic's article tries to make a very strange distinction between being a "good teammate" and being a "team player." But the way "team player" seems to be used here (both in the article and by the anonymous sources using it) is the way corporate CEOs use it: to indicate that an individual worker needs to do whatever they are told. It is true that Castellanos was never going to be that kind of team player. This is a man who wrote in his goodbye note to Philadelphia that "the powerful passion you have for your sports teams are not married to the lens of media companies that cover them. The color of your Collective Soul is your own to Paint ... together." Do you think "Rob" has any authority over this man's soul?
Castellanos was fun to watch, even when he was in a slump, and he was never a boring interview. The Phillies are making a strategic decision, for better or worse, to eat $20 million because they were not happy with his performance in 2025. His OPS was .694, and his fWAR was minus-0.6. They couldn't trade him, because they wanted so badly to get rid of him that they had no way to bluff, and now they want their fans to hate him for it. But I can't hate Nick Castellanos for that. They can't make me.
